AT THE TURN OF THE 20TH CENTURY, Stumm Jewelers, located on First Street here in Benicia, was The Place. It was where families went to purchase fine jewelry and upscale decorative arts for their homes. It also was the headquarters for an extensive postcard business that captured the West on film.

Through July 13, the Benicia Historical Museum continues its exhibit on the historic Stumm family of jewelers, instrument makers and photographers. The exhibit is titled “Stumm’s vintage postcard views of Benicia and beyond.” Curated by Bob Kvasnicka, Benicia resident and retired federal civil servant, the exhibit will feature postcards manufactured and distributed by Frank Stumm, whose father, F. J. was a pioneering jeweler in Benicia at the turn of the 19th century, and who took over the business upon F.J.’s death. Frank learned the art of photography and the business of photo postcards in Germany, and developed a successful postcard business based in Benicia. The exhibit will also feature the Stumm jewelry business. Some old Benicia families still have items purchased at their store in the first two decades of the last century.

An additional aspect of the exhibit is the international postcard craze of the last two decades of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. In an age before telephones and television — let alone emails, tweets and Facebook — postcards were an inexpensive and rapid means of communication between friends and family. Large clubs sprang up to exchange them, and postcard collecting clubs continue to this day.

The Stumm family’s musical instrument manufacturing companies in Germany will also be featured, including their manufacture of organs, some of which are still in use today in Europe and the U.S.

The Stumm family

Frank Stumm was born in Benicia to a father who emigrated from Germany and a mother who came from a frontier Solano County farming family. Frank’s father, Frank (F.J.) Stumm, was born in Kreuznach, Germany, in 1853. The Stumm family made and installed some of the finest organs in 19th-century Europe. F.J. apprenticed in Leipzig, where he learned the trade of making musical instruments. He excelled in metallurgy and soon turned his knowledge to watchmaking, working in this trade in Frankfurt, Cologne, Paris, Rotterdam and London before immigrating to New York circa 1869.

F.J. worked in New Jersey and New York for several prominent watch case manufacturers and is credited with several inventions in their manufacture. He was selected to travel to Mexico to introduce the American system of interchangeable cases and was enjoying great commercial success there until his trip was cut short by the Porfirio Diaz revolution of 1876.

Trying to escape from Mexico through Acapulco, F.J. was set upon by bandits, robbed and stabbed in the head. He escaped with his life aboard the U.S. Consul’s ship and was transported to San Francisco. He later wrote of his troubles and the conditions in Mexico in an open letter titled “How the Gringo Came Out” that was read before Congress.

All the same, San Francisco became his home, and it was here that he later married Elizabeth (Lizzie) Rose Tryon.

Elizabeth Stumm came from Rio Vista, a small town on the edge of the California Delta. Her father, Linus Tryon, had left Connecticut for the gold fields of California in 1850. He and his wife Catherine Ward first lived in Sacramento, where their first three daughters were born, and later purchased a sheep ranch in Rio Vista. They had five daughters, the oldest of which was Lizzie, born in 1858.

F.J. and Lizzie were married on January 1, 1876, and started a small millinery and jewelry store in Rio Vista. In 1878 they opened a store in Benicia and moved there permanently in 1880.

Early in his business career, F.J. Stumm’s store was robbed. A soldier came in at closing time asking to see gold pocket watches. Just as F. J. handed him a watch to examine, the man threw red pepper in Stumm’s face and ran from the store, watch in hand. F.J. gave chase even though he was nearly blind from the pepper, but fell a few blocks from the store. The police picked up the chase, and after a short pursuit with shots fired, apprehended the thief.

F.J. continued to run his highly successful business until about four years prior to his death in 1916. His son, Frank Stumm Jr., was born in 1882 and raised in Benicia. At 16 he traveled to study watchmaking in Germany for five years. There exist two artifacts from his time in Germany, a postcard he wrote from Etta and a diary of his travels to the Passion Play in Oberammergau.

He returned to Benicia in 1902 to work with his father in the jewelry business and in 1916, after his father died, he took it over. Shortly after his return from Europe he started publishing postcards that were printed in Germany. He probably learned photography and made contacts for publishing while there.

Frank ran the business until 1919, when he died suddenly during the worldwide influenza pandemic that killed millions. The day he died, five other people in Benicia passed away from the same disease. This left only Lizzie and her daughter Madeline to keep the business going.

The Frank Stumm postcard business

Frank Stumm was a postcard publisher. He commissioned a postcard, supplied the negative, and gave the printer directions about how to colorize it, what inscription to use and how to depict his name. A small publisher like Stumm would likely have also been the photographer. When the postcards were delivered, he would have marketed them, arranged for places to sell them and kept the dealers’ stocks replenished.

When Stumm was producing his images, there was little postcard copyright protection. The time and expense needed to copyright a postcard was seldom deemed to be worthwhile. In addition, the legal costs of protecting a copyright if someone were to infringe upon it were substantial. That is why the same image on early postcards were published under several different names. Stumm’s images were reproduced by large publishers in San Francisco and Vallejo. Though there may have been an informal partnership between publishers, it is more likely that one publisher often appropriated another’s images. It is also true that Stumm may have seen an advantage in letting other publishers produce his images, since this resulted in a larger distribution network.

As an example of the common practice of appropriation, there are many postcards depicting Stumm’s images of the ferryboat “Solano.” One in particular appears under the names of the E. H. Mitchell and Cardinell-Vincent Companies. Many of Stumm’s negatives were modified by the printers to enhance their appearance, and that appears to be the case with the “Solano” image.

How do we know this was a Stumm original? Because the Benicia Historical Museum has the negative from which the postcard was made. Interestingly, in the process of creating the postcard, the printer made some changes. If one compares the postcard to the original photograph, subtle differences become apparent. In the original image, the sky in the photograph is washed out, and yet clouds appear in the postcard. The hills on the right side have been raised, probably for artistic effect and contrast. Smoke is seen coming from the smokestacks, probably to give a sense of movement to the docking ship.

Printers often colorized scenes that they had never actually seen, using their imagination in selecting colors if the publisher hadn’t given them specific directions. So the colors might not have matched the actual scene.

Printers would require a minimum run of 500 to as many as 10,000 cards. It is unknown what Frank Stumm’s printers required, but from a 1906 newspaper article there is information that in one year he distributed 50,000 postcards. This is a remarkable feat when one considers that even in the Golden Age of Postcards, from 1907 to 1915, a small-town publisher would expect to average about 15,000 postcards per year.

Most of Frank Stumm’s postcards were printed in Germany, though some were printed by the Albertype Company in Brooklyn, N.Y. The Stumm family probably had connections in both places through Frank’s father, F. J. He had relatives in New Jersey and New York who may have helped broker a deal with the Albertype Company.

In the early 1900s, most postcards were printed in Germany because of the high quality resulting from their superior printing processes. Several factors caused this to change. In 1909, Congress added a tariff to imported postcards. Then, in 1914, World War I meant that many German printers were no longer available because materials were scarce and shipping was curtailed. For these reasons and possibly a desire to demonstrate his patriotism Frank Stumm was compelled to switch to the Albertype Company for the printing of his postcards.

It’s all there in the exhibit. The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from 1-4 p.m. In addition to the Stumm exhibit, there are exhibits on the history and industry of Benicia. Come check it out!